This interview was originally published in Edition 7 of Analog Forever Magazine. As of July 1st, 2024 there are approximately 10 copies left. Don’t miss out, this will never be reprinted!

A self-described “Americanized Israel,” Yoav Friedländer’s (@yoavfriedlanderperception) perception of the world is chaotic. Born in Ma’ale Adumim, a small settlement northeast of Jerusalem, in 1985, the artist’s childhood years were dominated by mediated American culture, desert landscapes filled with military checkpoints and artillery, and civil unrest. His series, A Form of View, is a personal investigation into the correlation between photography, perception, and reality. Using his life as a case study to explore the two cultures he has embraced, he investigates the influence American culture has had on his Israeli origins by studying how photography as a medium interprets and influences our worldly understanding by creating juxtapositions between miniature models and created landscapes.

These simulated realities narrate the connection between different cultures and countries regarding geographical insufficiencies, possibilities, and human relationships. Throughout Friedländer’s series, we are presented with the shadows of tanks above picnic tables, gas masks resting on immaculately made beds, and bullet holes that line windows into homes. Though these images appear straightforward in composition, they confront us with more questions than answers. This discourse is intentional, as the artist’s motives for his series are deeper than their physical nature. The harmonic essence of his imaginary landscapes contrasted with objects of war make us ponder the division between fiction and reality, which communicates an alternate understanding of human discernment.

To Friedländer, our understanding of reality and our memories concerning objects, people, and landscapes can be illustrated with photographs, even if we have never experienced them in person. Photography as a medium has diffused itself so well into the cultural consciousness that we find ourselves grasping to understand our place in the world and our fictional self-ascribed biographies. His series fundamentally questions the art of photography and successfully delivers the idea that reality has become augmented by its own reflection.

Beyond Friedländer’s philosophical aims for A Form of View, his story is just as inspiring. We are excited to share with you this interview that begins from the start of the first Gulf War in 1990 and takes us through trials of transition to America amidst an eating disorder which ends with the creation of Float Photo Magazine in 2014. Though his story isn’t over, it’s already worth telling.

INTERVIEW

Michael Behlen: Throughout your adolescence, you were obsessed with photography. Can you tell us more about it?

Yoav Friedländer: When I was a kid, I loved drawing and had excellent ideas in my head, but I couldn’t draw them right. I had incredible visions, but when I put pen to paper, I wasn’t able to recreate them. With photography, I learned that a camera could take postcards of the world that were perfect representations of places and events that created a sense of timelessness. They captured something, you know? However, even then, I wasn’t able to use the camera to do so, but I knew the possibilities were endless.

For example, I always wanted to take the family group shot and was notorious for chopping heads off—I clearly didn’t understand the guiding frame in the rangefinder. I have vivid memories of trying to stage a shot of me jumping over a little creek, which I remembered as an impressive chasm, only to find a disappointing image when the film was processed. I took disposable cameras with me to school field trips in middle school and fantasized about incredible shots only to end up with subpar imagery.

In 1998, for my Bar Mitzvah trip, we visited New York, and I was glued to the camera shop’s display windows. I was mesmerized by long lenses, and I used to imagine what kind of great photographs I would be able to shoot with them. One camera, in particular, stood out—it was mounted on a gun-like structure with a rifle trigger. I was obsessed with it for years after. When I was 15, I convinced my dad to buy me a Nikon Coolpix, and I took the camera everywhere, trying to figure out how to get a blurred background—with no success—I had no clue how to get the images I was fantasizing about creating.

MB: What was it like growing up in Israel during the Gulf War?

YV: I was born in 1985, so I was 5 and 6 years old during the first gulf war. I have a lot of vivid memories from that time that I am still coming to terms with and trying to understand. For example, I remember going with my parents to the community center to be fitted with a gas mask because at any moment, SCUD missiles were expected to be launched in our direction with nerve gas. These memories aren’t troubling due to the missiles but due to the lack of context. When I was a child, I didn’t understand war, and I didn’t know what was going to happen to me. This was compounded by the fact that while we were anticipating death, we saw rockets being launched on television, but everything was peaceful when we looked out the window. It was very confusing as a child, and I think that it created a weird relationship with television and reality. It was very theatrical, but it was severe. It was like living through a simulation of truth: it felt fake and real simultaneously. It has messed up my perception of reality ever since.

MB: How did this altered perception of reality change your perspective on the world?

YF: The obvious similarity between photographs and TV (as they are the result of recording the visible light) and reality has confused me since I was a child. Photographs promised me a version of reality from the past or a visualization of a current reality that is geographically inaccessible to me. Photography altered how I have experienced reality by providing me with a similar experience approximate to the reality that is yet different. What exists is different from how it is mapped in a photograph. Many of our understandings of reality and our relation to objects, people, and landscapes are being described by photographs and have never been experienced by us in person. Photography, at times, diffuses itself so well into our consciousness that we find ourselves considering what is real to be different from how it should be according to its own image. In a sense, they are like a recipe to remake a world.

Looking back on it now, I realize that you cannot escape the fact that if you see something in a picture and then go visit the place, your first impression is tainted. First impressions have a lot of power. You are figuratively leaving indentations in your perception of the world that affects your outlook on scenes and situations. So when your first impressions of a place are from photographs, it gives you a false expectation of what the place would be.

MB: How did mandatory military service affect your ability to create photographs?

YF: At the age of 18, I joined the military for a mandatory service of three years. I followed my father’s footsteps and ended up in the same brigade, the Paratroopers Brigade 202. I was the fourth generation of soldiers following my dad. My grandfather joined the British brigades before Israel won its independence in 1948 and eventually joined the newly established Israeli Defense Force (IDF). Before him, my great-grandfather was part of the Prussian Army during World War I. (During World War II he was sent to Auschwitz along with so many others and never came back).

In my first days of training, I was in shock by the transition and didn’t think much of photographing anything. But it didn’t take long before my eyes opened again. During my training I was able to see areas that I had never seen before, as they were off limits to civilians. I remember waking up early to the fog and sunrise in these landscapes and I was desperate to photograph them.

This turned out to become a reality as I suffered a back injury from parachuting early into my service that abruptly ended my combat training which moved me to an administrative position at the IDF headquarters in Tel Aviv. During that time, I was traveling every day from Ma’ale Adumim to Tel Aviv, starting the trip before sunrise and ending well after sunset. I purchased a Nikon D70, my first DSLR, and began to figure out how to create the images I had dreamed about since I was a kid.

MB: After your military service, you developed an eating disorder. How did photography help you get through this struggle?

YF: This was the darkest period of my life. I was gaining weight fast because I was still eating as if I was in combat training. I grew up on the round side and was always big, and sometimes fat, and never felt great about myself. This came to a head while I was at the beach, and my girlfriend’s uncle told me, “You look like you have gained 30 pounds” while I was digging a hole in the sand. A wave crashed upon me, and he added, “You look like a stranded whale.” This was the trigger point.

It all started like it normally would. I wanted to lose the added weight and started going to the gym every day and running 5K every other day. I was on the right track to a healthy lifestyle, though admittedly with an extremely strict diet. However, while visiting my girlfriend for a Saturday picnic, who was a soldier at the time, I couldn’t help myself. I devoured the homemade food that her mother had made and drove home feeling guilty. I don’t know where it came from, but suddenly I thought of just getting home and throwing up the food I ate. I got home, and surely I did. I didn’t know exactly how or what I was doing but I figured out how to vomit and experienced immediate relief. I had just saved myself from getting fat again.

It was too tempting. It was like cheating. I was able to eat and then just throw up. It became an addictive habit that led to obsessive-compulsive urges. I started counting the calories and spiraled down quickly, eating barely anything. I worked out religiously and vomited anything beyond the restrictions I had set for myself. It all became wilder, more dangerous, and more compulsive. I lost weight and saw a distorted image in the mirror. I was a sack of bones, and I nervously wanted to tear the loose skin off my body. I hated myself.

At some point, the crisis reached its climax. I ran away, essentially defecting from the military (for one day), and tried to end my life. I failed, which means I survived. I figured that if I was going to stick around, I had to get myself out of the grave I had dug for myself. It took me a couple years to completely heal but during that process, photography began taking over. I desperately wanted to have something other than food or my weight on my mind and I knew photography would distract me from it all. It was everything to me at that time and I believe it saved my life.

A desire to find, see, and relate to others’ experiences is the source of my motivation to work in the documentary style. It does not derive from a misguided desire to deal with personal psychological angst, but a sincere desire to develop understanding and connection with people who might superficially seem different than me. Curiosity plays an important role as well. Spending time with people too similar to myself can feel tedious. Meeting strangers, going through the transition whereby we become friends, and using a camera to facilitate and document this process is a powerful approach to resolving the tension between societally informed first impressions of a person, the possibility of mutual understanding and appreciation, and my curiosity of other’s individual experience. Photography is a great way to make friends, and you might as well document the developing friendship while you’re at it.

MB: How did photography transition from saving to becoming your life?

YF: It was months before my mandatory service of three years with the IDF was about to end, and I went to watch a movie with my dad at the mall when I stumbled upon a table with recruiters from Hadassah Academic College. I was contemplating at the time what I should do with myself as I really wanted a bachelor’s degree. Mostly because that’s the kind of pressure society puts on high-school graduates and fresh veterans. I was talking to the recruiters and asking questions about a graphic design degree because, from my knowledge, photography was some kind of an associate degree. They surprised me and said they had just opened a four-year program in photography. I signed up on the spot.

Fast forward to 2012, and I had moved to New York to pursue an MFA in photography at the School of Visual Arts. Looking back on it now, I still didn’t know what I wanted to be as I was always afraid of that question. Hell, I still don’t know what I am. However, I followed my heart and resisted the urge to succumb to self-doubt and dove head first into the medium and made a leap of faith to move to a completely different country to pursue my passion.

MB: At what point did you begin using film and analog processes?

YF: One evening, I stumbled across someone on Facebook who I had not seen for a couple of years. It was my life partner and the love of my life, Dana Stirling. I reached out, and we started talking, which resulted in a beautiful story of us falling in love which ironically led me to fall in love with film. This was before I moved to New York when Dana was pursuing her bachelor’s degree in photography. One afternoon I tagged along for one of her class assignments that was to be shot on color film even though, at the time, I was still pursuing my “religious” beliefs that film was blasphemy.

I remember that Dana was shooting the assignment around our hometown (we both grew up in Ma’ale Adumim). We hurried down a gravel road one day to shoot right before sunset, to Tzvika’s Pine Grove, a small grove minutes away from my house. Dana stood next to a lone pine tree and shot the picture that changed me forever. She shot the tree on EPP transparency film and it came out as vivid as the memory of that day was: as soft and calm as that young pine tree seemed in the orange, pink magenta light right before the sun sets.

After that I embarked on a personal project at the Jerusalem Biblical Zoo with large-format color photography. I instantly transitioned to shooting exclusively 4x5 transparency film in the worst place imaginable for that film—dark, artificially-lit environment behind the scenes of the zoo. In the clinic, the undecorated concrete and metal cages that are not designed to entertain us. There was no chart for reciprocity. It took me many trips of trial and error to come up with the exposures. I was sitting there against the wall, cramped into a corner, holding my breath as I was making long exposures on transparency film, not really knowing if anything came out, how off my composition might be. I had to trust my eyes and the process and pray for the gods of photography. The results cemented the feeling I got when looking at Dana’s color images. I was so inspired by her, and all I wanted was to have that deceptively quiet feeling that color film had to offer.

MB: What was your philosophical inspiration for “A Form of View”? How does being Jewish and having a cultural identity of an outsider inform your work?

YF: I want to question everything, including what we understand and how we came to understand it. What is a personal memory, and what is a cultural memory? I want people to look at the mechanism of the photograph rather than the photograph itself. I want them to be mesmerized and curious by the things that trigger me. My whole thesis for “A Form of View” was the concept of diaspora. In Israel, I didn’t feel I belonged because both of my grandparents fled there from outside their home countries. Even though I was in the Promised Land, I had no roots because when I look one generation back, I don’t have clear origins of my family.

In contrast, I grew up using the Bible as my history book, but also as a book of miracles. It impacted the way I viewed my life growing up. It was interesting to grow up in Bala Domain, a settlement on a hill that overlooked both the Dead Sea and Jerusalem, locations where King David, Saul, and Solomon all lived and died. The talk of how miracles happened in the same places where historical figures lived made it hard to untangle and separate the historical record and my religion.

This is manifested in my view of photography. All of the manipulations I can do and the angles I choose mirror the fact that I am only telling half of the story with the camera lens. The other half comes from my imagination. I think it’s all related to feeling like I was always a stranger in any culture I lived in. I come from Israel, but I don’t belong there, a feeling I have become used to. So it doesn’t harm me but grants me the ability to see both sides of American and Israeli culture as an outsider, which allows me to create works that question both my identity and ideas.

MB: Does photography help you become grounded in your perception of reality or does it just offer more questions?

YF: It depends on in which direction you’re going because sometimes you take photographs of something you’re ignorant about. You document a place you don’t know, and when you take the picture, you’re making an assumption. Over time you discover that there was a meaning for that place, and it wasn’t what you projected on that place. That idea in itself provides a delicate balance between fact and fiction. It’s important because a lot of what’s around us is just unquestionably accepted. I think if you don’t question this, you don’t sharpen your ability to discern what you’re ignorant about.

MB: Your transition from Israel to America inspired your series “A Form of View.” Can you tell us more about this?

YF: My reaction to the landscape was an interpretation of the context of what’s visible. For many years, my eyes scanned the landscapes of Israel. There were numerous field trips on Saturdays when I traveled across the country, from the deserts of the south to the white peak of Mount Hermon up in the north. I grew to know and recognize the context in which I saw the landscape: biblical sites in the form of pale excavated limestone, empty valleys that once were occupied by heavy war machines, and the armored skeletons that were remnants of those heroic battles. As I grew up in the valley of the Judean Desert between Jerusalem and the Dead Sea, I projected both the recent history of my country and its biblical one onto the surrounding landscape. The presence of the military in the landscape was always perceived as integral, and naturally aligned with the history of the land as it always has been, and still is described. As an Israeli, my perception is chaotic, composed of mediated American culture, desert landscapes of childhood, and war, which became integral in my life. I was trained to see and understand the world through photographs. The motivation for this visual exploration is the strong influence of American culture, specifically in the form of photography, had and still has, on my Israeli origins.

Photography has visually mapped reality since it started, a broken promise that we’ve made to ourselves by looking up to the medium as a neutral reflection of what visibly exists. Many of our understandings of reality are being described by photographs and have never been experienced by us in person. Photographs have set expectations for things we might encounter in the future; at times, we find ourselves considering what is real to be different from how it should be according to its own image. My work is a conjunction between Israel and America. It focuses on similarities and differences between two different cultures and sets of geographical locations seen through my perspective as an “Americanized Israeli.”

MB: Can you describe how you have contextualized your ideas of American and Israeli perspectives into your series?

YF: The Americanization of Israel happened through the mediation of American culture. I suspect that, as a result, something changed in the way Israelis perceive Israel, that the aspiration to be like the Americans has changed our perception of the landscape itself. Even though small in scale, Israel’s landscape seems to contain enough diversity to match that of the American landscape: desert in the south, the sea in the west, creeks, and valleys to the east, a snow-peaked mountain to the north; at least one long road through the desert, and forest-like area near Armageddon (Har Megiddo–Meggido Mountain).

The biblical landscape in its modern form has a thin coat of America. This cultural coat serves as a context through which we see and understand our environment and through which we address and perceive what is natural and integral as part of our identity and what we identify with. Photography, along with cinematography, allowed for a partial importation and mobilization of American culture from its geographical origin to Israel in the Middle East; a partial teleportation of American values that only somewhat represent the reality from which it was originally taken. The “image” of America is a derivative of an American reality; yet viewed by the eyes of a foreigner, America is being contextualized through a process of comparison—what I have in sight or at hand in comparison to an ideal culture and ideal lifestyle that is being portrayed by images.

Aspects of life that were perceived as lacking were desired, imported, and embedded into the culture in Israel: The vast landscape in American photography, whether forests or deserts, is waiting to be conquered through a journey rather than war; the frontlines of the American wars, in general, are overseas rather than at home. Teenagers grow up, finish high school, and go to college rather than join the army at the age of 18. Americanization is the embedding process of an idealized culture lost in translation. As Israelis, we can understand the American culture only in relation to our interests of what it represents. The meanings we extract from an imagined American culture are not the same in their essence, and are dissimilar to the cultural content that was poured in the process of making them in America. It is clear that images of idealized America have had a strong influence on modern Israel and that its Americanization is a derivative of American culture, yet it is not certain that what appears as similar between the two cultures actually embraces similar content. I base my thesis on the recognition that our world is informed by images. Photographs represent and replace experiences, memories, landscapes, and objects. Our past still exists in the form of photographs, and we will move on to a future that is based on those photographs and the context through which we interpret them. Since the invention of the photograph, reality has become augmented by its own image. I am focusing my work on that point of friction.

MB: While you do partake in many different ways of making photographs, it appears your model building has had a significant effect on this series. What was it that drew you to this process as a way of giving perspective to your imagery?

YF: When I began my MFA at the School of Visual Arts in New York in 2012, I had a large amount of photographs from both Israel and New York that I hadn’t scanned yet. My critique class professor Penelope Umbrico began asking me where I was going to go with these images. I felt like I had more images to create back in Israel but didn’t have access to do so. When I brought up this dilemma my professor immediately said, “For next class bring an image of a scale model. I don’t care if it looks crappy.” So I began thinking of the watchtowers that were so common in my childhood landscapes and decided to glue pieces of wood together to create a representation of those memories.I was proud of what I had created and took a photograph of it on my bed on my phone. I was immediately struck by a feeling I had never felt before in photography.Somehow the bed became my childhood landscape and the watchtower, as incomplete as it was, conjured these memories from my childhood with great force.

This moment of photographing this miniature watchtower was very consequential for me. It taught me about photography, perception, and myself. This realization brought back the strange feelings of being an immigrant, longing for access to places and landscapes that were privatized, both in America and Israel. Many of the places I wanted to photograph were military exclusion zones which were too dangerous and locked behind fences and gates. Model making gave me the freedom to make images I couldn’t take from the place itself and allowed me to create physical representations of them.

For “A Form a View,” I didn’t want to go the route of the railroad-model landscapes in which you’re trying to create one- to-one representations: emulating the soil, for example, attempting to make the tanks realistic. It isn’t about recreating but reinterpreting the composition of things that trigger familiarity. In “Army Picnic,” for example: you see the shadow of a tank on a hill and you know it’s a tank, but only because of your preconceived notions of what it should look like to begin with. It’s a signifier, something that has a lot of power that I wanted to harness within the image. With very simple shapes, it tells a story of something that is not in the picture at all through the abstraction of our cultural memories.

Interestingly enough, in Hebrew, the word abstract simply translated means simplification. I channeled this idea into my work by using the least amount of evidence possible to create the most significant impression possible, shapes and ideas that make you immediately understand and ponder the scenes in front of you. My work is centered around this idea of abstract representations and how photographs have the power to convey a feeling of something real through the manipulation of geometric illusion.

For “A Form a View,” I didn’t want to go the route of the railroad-model landscapes in which you’re trying to create one-to-one representations: emulating the soil, for example, attempting to make the tanks realistic. It isn’t about recreating but reinterpreting the composition of things that trigger familiarity. In “Army Picnic,” for example: you see the shadow of a tank on a hill and you know it’s a tank, but only because of your preconceived notions of what it should look like to begin with. It’s a signifier, something that has a lot of power that I wanted to harness within the image. With very simple shapes, it tells a story of something that is not in the picture at all through the abstraction of our cultural memories.

Interestingly enough, in Hebrew, the word abstract simply translated means simplification. I channeled this idea into my work by using the least amount of evidence possible to create the most significant impression possible, shapes and ideas that make you immediately understand and ponder the scenes in front of you. My work is centered around this idea of abstract representations and how photographs have the power to convey a feeling of something real through the manipulation of geometric illusion.

MB: Beyond your personal work, you and your wife founded “Float Magazine.” Why did you create this platform, and what inspires you to keep it running?

YF: In 2014, Dana and I were both in the US, and two things happened simultaneously. I was finishing my graduate degree, and Dana was about to start hers. At the time, we struggled to have our work published in magazines and websites. It was crucial because we were both immigrants and needed artist visas to remain in the United States. We had the desire but also the necessity to become established artists with proof that we were both pursuing this for personal and practical reasons.

In March of that year, we realized that many young artists needed an outlet, just like we did, for their work to reach a larger audience. Our goal was to create something more casual to provide opportunities for artists like ourselves to see their work alongside more established artists, furthering their credibility within the art world.

At “Float,” we remove the concept of gatekeepers and provide the chance for artists to receive one of their first acceptance letters instead of the long chain of denial emails they are used to. I think about how many artists may have stopped pursuing their art without a little recognition and acknowledgment and it’s what inspires us to keep this project alive.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Yoav Friedländer is the co-founder of Float Photo Magazine (2014) and the Rust Belt Biennial (2018). Born in Jerusalem in 1985, he spent most of his life in his hometown of Maale-Adummim. Situated between Jerusalem and the Dead Sea, on a limestone hill at the edge of the Judean mountains, his perception of the world took shape. After 18 years of preparation, he joined the army for a mandatory service of three years, starting as a paratrooper. He followed in the footsteps of his father and grandfather, Kurt (Arie), who fled Austria for Israel after Kristallnacht, served in the British Brigade during WWII, and later in the Israeli Army. In the fall of 2007, only four months after completing his army service, he began his B.A. studies in Photography at Hadassah Academic College Jerusalem. After graduating in 2011, he moved to New York, where he worked as a security officer for Israeli aviation for nearly four years. In the fall of 2012, while working at JFK Airport, he started an MFA in Photography at the School of Visual Arts, graduating in 2014.

Ever since he can remember, photographs have introduced and informed him of personal and collective past or present realities that are otherwise inaccessible or out of reach. Photographs visually mapped reality—a broken promise made to ourselves by looking up to the medium as a neutral reflection of what visibly exists. We treat photographs as hard evidence, often considering what is real to be different from how it should be according to its own image. Since the inception of photography, reality has gradually become augmented by its own reflection. Friedländer focuses his work at this point of friction.

Connect with Yoav Friedländer on his Website and on Instagram!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Michael Behlen is an instant film addict and the founder and publisher of Analog Forever Magazine. Behlen is an obsessive community organizer in the film photography world, including previously launching the independent publishing projects PRYME Magazine and PRYME Editions, two enterprises dedicated to the art of instant film. Through these endeavors, he has featured and published 250+ artists from around the globe via his print and online publications.

He has self-published two Polaroid photobooks -“Searching for Stillness, Vol. 1” and “I Was a Pioneer,” literally a boxed set of his instant film work. His latest book, Searching for Stillness Vol II was published in 2020 by Static Age. He has been published, interviewed, and reviewed in a quantity of magazines and online publications, from F-Stop and Blur Magazine to the Analog Talk Podcast. He loves the magic sensuality of instant film: its saturated, surreal colors; the unpredictability of the medium; its addictive qualities as you watch it develop. He spends his time shooting instant film and backpacking in the California wilderness, usually a combination of the two.

Connect with Michael Behlen on his Website and Instagram!